Berkeleyan

It’s sometimes hard to recall that Berkeley was once just
another American town, whose citizens cooked, served, and ate
what Americans everywhere did.

Then, in the early 1970s, a new breed of restaurant broke the
Boy-R-Dee mold — along with a handful of places where Berkeleyans
could shop for interesting foods to prepare at home. Patricia
Unterman’s Beggar’s Banquet, Alice Waters’s
Chez Panisse, Victoria Wise’s Pig by the Tail (a French-style
charcuterie occupying the space where the Cheeseboard Pizza Collective
now thrives), the Cheeseboard itself — all opened in quick
succession, feeling their way toward success with a reliance on
enthusiastic but largely self-taught labor, an ad hoc supply chain,
and the curiosity of their clientele.

Where town met gown, the Swallow Collective, with a café
ensconced on the ground floor of the Berkeley Art Museum, attracted
its own cadre of loyalists. The collective’s best-known
alum is Ruth Reichl, currently the editor of Gourmet
magazine.

(Bart Nagel photo)

"The Swallow was originally started by people from the Cheeseboard,"
Reichl recalled in a recent exchange with the Berkeleyan.
(Her co-collectivists are familiar characters to those who’ve
read her best-selling memoir, Tender at the Bone, which
devoted a full chapter to The Swallow.) The cooks were "very
conscious of being a collective, and in that sense experimental,"
she continued. "We also felt the need to be cutting edge
about the food. We were making quiche at a time when people were
coming in and asking ‘What’s a kichay?’ on a
daily basis."

The Swallow’s cooks attempted such radical innovations
as genuine Italian antipasti (in an era when sliced salami and
pimento-stuffed olives fairly well exhausted that repertoire),
Moroccan and Indonesian dishes, even fresh-baked bread (!). Reichl
herself ventured out on the farthest imaginable limb by undertaking
to make fresh chutneys.

"That doesn’t sound so out there now," she said,
"but in the early ’70s people were startled that we
baked our own pastries and made fresh vinaigrette for our salads."

La plus ça change . . .
The old Swallow space is occupied today by another café
perched squarely on the culinary cutting edge. Sarah Rich, the
young chef at Café Muse, is bringing her imaginative "raw
food" dishes to a near-campus venue in the hope that Berkeley’s
adventurous diners will enjoy and then embrace it.

Rich developed her love for vegetarian cooking while attending
Stanford. "I made a lot of vegan things for the people in
my co-op," she says, "but tried to be creative …
to make something more than ‘co-op slop,’ where you
throw stuff into a big wok and stir it around." She became
interested in raw food through her reading in "health philosophy,"
although over time political, social, and ethical issues have
become interwoven with her purely health-oriented concerns. She
honed her skills in food preparation and presentation while operating
an East Bay catering company, Artemisia Foods, before taking the
chef’s job at Café Muse this past winter. It’s
her first-ever restaurant gig.

Café Muse now features half a dozen raw dishes on its
menu daily, along with a variety of more conventionally prepared
sandwiches, soups, and salads. Hence, if you’re seeking
a change from your standard deli sandwich — even though
in this "deli" you’d be lunching on organically
raised chicken, Niman Ranch pastrami, and dolphin-safe tuna salad
— you can experiment with a pad Thai whose "noodles"
are peeled from the flesh of young coconuts, served with a Thai-style
sauce made from pureéd Fresno chiles, medjool dates, Celtic sea
salt, garlic, and rice vinegar.

None of the ingredients in this or the other raw dishes are cooked
above 110 degrees Fahrenheit — which means, essentially,
that they’re not cooked at all. Foodies are familiar with
this approach because of the success achieved by Roxanne Klein
in her eponymous (and profoundly upscale) Marin County restaurant,
Roxanne’s. And healthy-eating advocates have pursued raw-food
regimens of one kind or another for years, though most have failed
to reach a broader audience.

Café Muse stakes its claim in the middle ground: You don’t
need an expense account to eat there (entrees top out at $6.50),
nor must you be on Gypsy Boots’s speed-dial list. Creativity
is given free reign: you can enjoy a Thai-style curry/butternut-squash
soup with young coconut water, a lasagna built on layers of sliced
zucchini, cashew "ricotta," and a "marinara"
of sundried tomatoes moistened with nama shoyu, or a "taco"
salad with cashew "crema" and pumpkin seed "refritos."

What’s with all the quotation marks?
They’re ours, not the menu’s. Responding to a semi-serious
question about why anyone would bother to make a taco salad without
refried beans, seasoned hamburger, shredded iceberg lettuce, jack
cheese, and gloppy bottled salsa, Rich first acknowledges that
it can be "terribly annoying" to have health-food dishes
named after mainstream foods they only narrowly resemble. But,
she continues: "I suppose the reason for naming raw dishes
after the counterparts they attempt to mimic has to do with making
them accessible to those who are trying raw food for the first
time. Part of it, too, is about having fun adapting old familiars
into raw-style dishes."

Though she fully embraces the salubrious effects of a raw-food
diet — including the efficient absorption, digestion, and
utilization of stored food energy by our bodies, as well as improved
planetary progress toward biodiversity, sustainability, seasonality,
and reduced fossil-fuel consumption — Rich is no one’s
idea of a sprout-tossing faddist.

"I don’t want raw food to be perceived as a poor attempt
at remaking familiar food for the sake of better health,"
she insists. "I want it to be perceived as a new movement
in food — not only for the sake of good health, but for
the sake of novelty and art."

Her approach dovetails with that of the café’s owner,
Daryl Ross, who operates several food-service facilities on and
near campus, including Caffè Strada, the Free Speech Movement
Café (in Moffitt Library), and Boalt Hall’s Café
Zeb. Long interested in the organic movement, Ross hadn’t
incorporated that philosophy into his business until an "epiphanic"
encounter with Alice Waters during the planning of what became
the FSM Café.

"I realized I wanted to offer an alternative menu for UC
Berkeley students, faculty, and staff, " Ross says, "in
contrast to what other places around here provide — something
that would be organic, sustainable, and affordable. That became
my vision, which by offering raw food at Café Muse we’ve
extended even farther." Ross intends to incorporate raw food
into the menu of Adagia, a new "destination" restaurant
he plans to open in the redeveloped Westminster House Presbyterian
ministry on Bancroft Way, across the street from Caffè
Strada (and, not incidentally, from the Berkeley campus as well).

The Berkeley dining revolution of 1971 has consolidated its gains
around the nation. Will Café Muse warrant a full chapter
in Sarah Rich’s memoirs 30 years hence? Or will "raw
food" be remembered as a passing craze, the way foodies now
look back on "fusion" and pink peppercorns? If commitment,
dedication, and deliciousness are the criteria for lasting success,
failure may find Café Muse, Adagia, and their nascent ilk
a hard (and decidedly raw) nut to Swallow.

Café Muse is located at 2625 Durant Ave., between College
and Telegraph, at the rear entrance to the Berkeley Art Museum.
It is open daily from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Thursdays until 7 p.m.